When Leaders Use Churches and Bibles as Photo Op Props

Like most of us across the nation, I've been watching events unfold over the past week, events that seem designed to break our collective hearts, events that move some of us to demonstrating in the streets, events that move some of us to writing a variety of responses, events that move some of us to prayer vigils and/or lamentations.

Will we look back on this time as a period that catapulted us to a new age?  The videos of the officer's knee on the neck of a handcuffed black man for 9 minutes as the life drained out of him, will we come to see that as iconography that moved us all to demand justice and kept our demands front and center until we saw a new world forged from the ruins of the old?

It's too soon to tell.  Some of us feel we've been here before, and change wasn't lasting.  I've come to view change as a spiral or a labyrinth.  We may feel we're right back at the same place, but it's different.

One of my friends made this Facebook post:  "Today I'm remembering a book written by Keith Watkins, Liturgies in a Time When Cities Burn, published in 1969. At the end of his 2017 blog post looking back on the book Keith writes: 'As frontispiece, I used a statement from Philosophical Sketches by Susanne K. Langer. We are living, she wrote in 1964, in a new Middle Ages, 'a time of transition from one social order to another. . .We feel ourselves swept along in a violent passage, from a world we cannot salvage to one we cannot see; and most people are afraid.' Half a century later, we seem to be living in that same world.'"

And then, there's the photo of the president of the U.S. in front of the historic Episcopal church, the peaceful protesters violently cleared out of the way so that the president could go to the church and pose with a Bible.  This event, after the president spent the day fuming and spewing about the need to deal with protesters with as much force as possible, perhaps even using our own military against the citizens of the nation.

In a Facebook post my pastor Keith Spencer said it better than I could: 

"Maybe the president should have opened that Bible and turned to Galatians 6:7:
'Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.'

Or Isaiah 5:20-21
'Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.
21Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
and clever in their own sight.'

I was struck by the sign behind the president that gave the online worship schedule.  In years to come, will historians look at that sign and remember why the church had online worship?  Will online worship be so common that we won't think anything about it?

I am fairly sure that the historic Episcopal church hadn't been offering online worship just 3 months before yesterday.  I realize that most historians will focus on other parts of our history that were happening in June of 2020, but that bit leapt out at me.

This morning, the words of Matthew 24 came back to me:  "Jesus said, 'Watch out for doomsday deceivers. Many leaders are going to show up with forged identities, claiming, ‘I am Christ, the Messiah.’ They will deceive a lot of people. When reports come in of wars and rumored wars, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history; this is no sign of the end. Nation will fight nation and ruler fight ruler, over and over. Famines and earthquakes will occur in various places. This is nothing compared to what is coming." (verses 4-8, in Eugene Peterson's translation, The Message)

My whole life, I've gotten reminders that the world will judge us in many ways, but many of the judgments come back to hypocrisy:  do our words match our actions?  When President Trump acted the way that he has always acted, appealing to the worst parts of our nature, I was saddened, but soon no longer shocked.  When he acts that way while trying to co-opt the better parts of our nature, I am both saddened and shocked--and angry.

I've lived through many administrations now, and some of them I've liked better than others.  I'd take any of them now in exchange for this chaos and madness.  There was some kernel of human goodness in all of them, and in some, those seeds bloomed under the stress of current events.  I continue to believe in narratives of grace and resurrection, but these days . . .  these days test my tendency towards optimism.